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I was reflecting on my visit with a bunch of hippie environmentalists at a party in California, and I was saddened by their lack of knowledge (Note: I am sympathetic to hippie environmentalist causes). They told stories of chaining themselves in trees, recycling, and dumpster-diving, but there was a startling lack of commitment to the two greatest sources of pollution that one has immediate control over: car emissions and diet. Before I explain, I am citing a newspaper article from the Star Tribune in the late 1990's. I cannot find a better source than that for the car emissions.

Car Emissions: first, my main hippie environmentalist friend drives cars powered by vegetable oil or biodiesel, so he gets a pass. Many of the hippies, though, drove to the party in petroleum-powered cars. I am not going to discuss this much, because this is a somewhat difficult change to make.

Diet: Diet, however, is a very easy change to make. Recently (and past) reports from the University of Chicago have indicated that the best way to save the planet is to become a vegetarian. Here are quotes from the article:

" Producing a calorie of meat protein means burning more than ten times as much fossil fuels--and spewing more than ten times as much heat-trapping carbon dioxide--as does a calorie of plant protein...According to the UN report, it gets even worse when we include the vast quantities of land needed to give us our steak and pork chops. Animal agriculture takes up an incredible 70% of all agricultural land, and 30% of the total land surface of the planet. As a result, farmed animals are probably the biggest cause of slashing and burning the world's forests. Today, 70% of former Amazon rainforest is used for pastureland, and feed crops cover much of the remainder. These forests serve as "sinks," absorbing carbon dioxide from the air, and burning these forests releases all the stored carbon dioxide, quantities that exceed by far the fossil fuel emission of animal agriculture.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the real kicker comes when looking at gases besides carbon dioxide--gases like methane and nitrous oxide, enormously effective greenhouse gases with 23 and 296 times the warming power of carbon dioxide, respectively. If carbon dioxide is responsible for about one-half of human-related greenhouse gas warming since the industrial revolution, methane and nitrous oxide are responsible for another one-third. These super-strong gases come primarily from farmed animals' digestive processes, and from their manure. In fact, while animal agriculture accounts for 9% of our carbon dioxide emissions, it emits 37% of our methane, and a whopping 65% of our nitrous oxide."

I don't understand how someone can call him/herself an environmentalist without becoming a vegetarian; this confuses me, since it is the single most powerful thing that one can do to save the environment. Many internet environmental sites don't even acknowledge this.

PETA, of course, has an amusing take on this.

I'm done being judgmental (for now).

posted by Dirk Awesome @ 6:22 PM